Need home electric advice

We have a 109 year old home that was built very well. The house was wired by the homeowner who was an electrical engineer. When we moved here, we had the electrical mains redone with new circuit breakers and throughout and some new wiring when we had the kitchen and bathroom remodeled.

My mom says she had to have the plugs all "pigtailed". The new wiring has it's own ground wire that is properly connected back at the breaker box, but the old house wiring doesn't have any ground wire (naturally).

Here is where it is confusing me- Some of our plugs have a white wire that attaches at the ground and it is connected to the neutral wire! I find this disturbing because when we connected my computer to the outlet it was fine until I connected a grounded coaxial cable wire to the "grounded" computer!

The electricity went from the neutral-positive through the metal box in the computer and fried the coax TV cable under the house.

I want to know why the hell the ground is connected to the neutral wire and not a separate wire grounded to a boiler pipe or grounding rod under the house. Is this legal? and is it safe?

We are trying to see if we are leaking electricity somewhere and we do not like the fact that our coax cable is acting as the only ground wire for the TVs and computer. We had to take that white wire off of any plug that has a component that is connected to a coaxial cable.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks

 

In the breaker box, the ground and neutral often share a bus bar and are interconnected via a cable. However, the ground should be on a separate line beyond the box. The NEC does not permit grounding to water pipes anymore, it's against code.

 

Thanks. The cable is attached to a boiler pipe, but it is only temporary. I wonder if the positive and neutral wires are switched somewhere. There shouldn't be feedback like that right?

 

I'm thinking inadequate ground, I would think about replacing ALL the wiring to bring everything up to code, It's really easy to DIY. nothing to it really , just shut off the breakers, rip out the old wire, and run new romex to the breaker panel.

 

Thanks! I will highly consider it!

 

Good answer, the neutral wire is in fact ground and as stated above can share the same bus at the main box. But, in CA. in a immobile build before
the new regs. and with out grounding, we use GFI outlets in which the ground wire is connected to the neutral and makes the ungrounded outlet a grounded one and perfectly legal.

 

I'm a bit confused here, I've always been taught that neutral is not the same as ground and to never mix the two of them, that ground pretty much only has current flow when there is a fault, for example if the live wire melts and touches its metal conduit (grounded) so it'll create a large short circuit current which would then trip the OC device.